


God In The Details

by Able_Jack



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: And a pretty good girlfriend, Canon Lesbian Character, Canon Lesbian Relationship, F/F, Nicole Haught is a good cop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 15:14:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19065211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Able_Jack/pseuds/Able_Jack
Summary: “Shitfire, you grew up tall,” is the very first thing her new boss says to her. Well, there had been two phone interviews, and one disconcertingly glitchy video call, but apparently those hadn’t been enough to establish proof of height.“I’m sorry?” Nicole says, hesitating in the doorway. She’s been in Purgatory for three days, and this is honestly not the weirdest moment so far.----Deputy Nicole Haught arrives in Purgatory, woos her girl, and indulges in being a mighty fine cop.





	God In The Details

**Author's Note:**

> Back in the ancient days of 1997, little Jackie was a sad young homosexual growing up in a provincial town and attending Catholic school. Things weren’t great re: feelings about my immortal soul. Luckily, someone finally invented the internet and I used it to read Xena fan fiction. 
> 
> Except it was really Xena porn, and Jesus God and All The Saints, those authors gave me a lifesaving education. Who knew femslash smut could keep a sad kid from offing themselves? 
> 
> All that being said, I’m not paying the favour back to the current crop of 16 year olds. This fic isn’t explicit enough to teach nothin’ to nobody. Unless you want to learn about Nicole’s feeeeelings about being a good cop and falling in love. There are eyelashes, people, and they bat at Nicole. 
> 
> Don't let the title worry you, it's not actually about god.

Nicole spends close to six hours driving away, one hand out the window, playing in the breeze as she sweats across the prairies. She keeps the radio off, and broods. 

“You’re way too young to be so fucking nostalgic,” her Staff Sergeant had told her the day she surrendered her badge and dress uniform. She’d caressed the crisp folds, and thought of the day she’d unwrapped it for the first time. The hours she had spent ironing the creases in, and her thrill at the project.

Five years later she’s worn the uniform to three funerals and one wedding. She’s grown her hair out from her more militant phase of the Homosexual’s Progress. She’s got a little buffer in her RRSP. She’s made vows in haste, and betrayed them at leisure. She’s left every trace of her birth family behind. She doesn’t feel young.

“Yeah, sure,” she tells Staff, and slams the car door hard enough to make her cat yowl from her carrier. 

“Hey,” he shouts through the window, until she relents and rolls it down. He hadn’t been a bad supervisor.

“Here’s the thing, Haught. You’ve got the look. I can practically see the fucking Glorious Martyr inside you, longing for a cause. What you need to remember is that once you’re dead, you’re not alive to collect the glory. Right?”

“Sure,” she tells him again. He grimaces, and she puts the car into drive.

So here she is, sweating and brooding, but above all driving away from everything that feels broken. It’s pointless, and stupid, and eventually she decides enough is well and truly enough. When she sweeps past the sign saying Purgatory is only 7 klicks away, she jerks the wheel onto the shoulder. 

She leans on the dusty side of the car, drinking a bottle of water with one heel kicked up on the quarter panel and her butt rubbing a clean spot. The back of her shirt is sweated through, and the breeze wicks across. She looks at the little scrub trees, and looks down the road towards the town, and feels something very like anticipation unfurl inside her.

“Well, hey,” she tells it. “Glad to see you again.”

 

*****  
“Shitfire, you grew up tall,” is the very first thing her new boss says to her. Well, there had been two phone interviews, and one disconcertingly glitchy video call, but apparently those hadn’t been enough to establish proof of height.

“I’m sorry?” Nicole says, hesitating in the doorway. She’s been in Purgatory for three days, and this is honestly not the weirdest moment so far. She’s starting to suspect all that claptrap about small town quirkiness has been neither clap, nor trap.

“Nothing,” Sheriff Nedley waves her into his office. She stands at something respectful, but short of full attention. “I see you’ve got the uniform squared away.”

She forces herself not to finger the unfamiliar Stetson hat she’s holding. It’s ridiculous, and above all white. She suspects it will quickly become the bane of her existence. The sheriff doesn’t seem to notice her distraction.

“The townsfolk will call you Officer, because they don’t understand the difference between that and a deputy. You don’t need to correct them. It irritates ‘em, and they won’t change.”

“Yes sir.”

“Has anyone shown you your locker?”

“No, sir. I left my duty bag in the bullpen.”

Nedley grunts. “You did five years in the city, Haught. But you’re still the rookie in this shop.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, you understand the boys are currently busy duct taping your bag to the floor?” He thinks, “Or the ceiling.”

“I suspected, but did not know for certain, sir.”

“And because you’re, ah, because you’re _you_ ,” he waves vaguely up her general body, “they are probably covering it with, er, lady items. I’m warning you now so you don’t take up the notion of it being sexual harassment.”

Nicole grits her teeth. “Noted, sir.”

“They also don’t understand how to put the toilet seat down, and I suspect there’s currently salt in the sugar dispenser.”

“Thank you for the warning, sir.”

“Well, that’s about it. Welcome to the Purgatory Sheriff’s Department, Deputy Haught.”

“Thank you, sir.” 

She hasn’t been dismissed, so she just stands there. The Sheriff drums his fingers briefly on his desk. “Haught. Nicole. I recruited you because I expected you could do well here. Purgatory is a small town, but we have outsized crime.”

Nicole nods. She’s done her due diligence. Purgatory has cyclical crime spikes that don’t currently attach to any known economic or population trends. She’s going to crack the mystery, and the white paper will have her name right at the top.

Nedley continues: “We need your city experience, and I told you the truth when I said there was room for advancement. The boys are going to cut up, but I want you to understand that I want you here. And in a few months, after they settle down, the boys will want you here, too.”

Nicole relaxes for the first time. “I want to do well here, sir. I sincerely thank you for the opportunity.”

“Just work hard,” he grunts at her, before gesturing her back out the door. 

 

*****  
The first time Nicole sees Waverly Earp, she stares with a caveman intention that she’ll blush about later.

The second time she sees her, Nicole lies, saying she knows about dating the XY chromosomal set. She figures the universe will forgive her.

She looks Waverly up in the DMV database. Technically it’s illegal, but she’s already racked up perjury. Waverly is only twenty-one. She closes the file. Their age gap is too wide, and the jump from early to late twenties is too critical. She needs to put this little crush away.

She holds her resolve for almost four full hours.

 

*****  
The sound of her glove hitting the punching bag is somehow meaty, Nicole decides. It feels good. Doing it for real feels even better, and meatier. Her fist crashing into someone’s face, or gut. 

The timer for the interval dings, and she pants with gloves on knees. It was only 90 seconds, but her shoulders burn worse that her lungs. Pathetic for a jock, but the four parallel rakes on her shoulder feel like a reasonable excuse.

She’s fairly certain they are from claws. She’s also fairly certain the claws had been attached to human hands. Punching into her, and splashing her own blood around her cruiser. Taking Wynonna, and leaving Waverly pale and weeping.

The rest interval dings completed, and she groans. She loves the pop and fizz of exercise, but boxing is shitastically fucking hard. She really should ease up, but the weirdness of Purgatory has been burned into her skin. She’s pretty certain another kidnapping attempt is far more _when_ , and not much _if_. Ready or not, the boogie man will come.

“I thought you were in hospital?” Wynonna’s leaning in the doorway, sipping from a coffee cup. If the world was truly luck, it might actually contain coffee.

“I got sprung.”

Not so much sprung, as walked out. Nedley had raised holy hell, but what could he do? She’s taller than him.

“Yeah. Let’s go with that.” Wynonna sways to some inner notes. Nicole rips the velcro of a glove open with her teeth and yanks it off.

“Why are you drinking so early?”

“Very butch.” Wynonna winks. “I finished a life goal. Or seven. I’m celebrating.”

“Binging,” Nicole corrects.

“Potato, rutabaga. I vanquished evil. I deserve a couple nips.”

“Sure,” Nicole says. This is just another Purgatory conversation, cryptic and opaque, and she is utterly full to her back teeth of cryptic and opaque. She pulls the other glove off, and stalks past Wynonna.

“I’ve got a report to write. Have a good night, Wynonna. It sure looks like you’re on your way.”

“You’re a sexy beast,” Wynonna yells down the hallway after her.

 

*****  
The seventeenth time she sees Waverly Earp, it is way out on the edge of town, making fast tracks for the hills and determined to freeze to death. Nicole cajoles her into her cruiser, and wonders what it feels like to be adored by that kind of stubborn. 

It goes wrong though, and Nicole burns as Waverly snaps her at the end of a tether, old shame working into her long bones. She drives Waverly back into town, and afterwards she does not cry. Audacity is for the majority, and she always should have known better.

The eighteenth time she sees Waverly Earp is entirely different. A joy so hard it makes her frantic and rough.

 

*****  
Dispatch gets a call for a domestic disturbance, and Nicole is the closest unit. When she pulls into the drive, there’s a kid sitting on the front porch and _fuck yous_ leaking from around the door. 

The woman who opens the door has a swelling bruise high on her cheek. Nicole wants to unfasten the snap down on her holster, because city slicker or crazy hick, domestics are where cops get killed. But fast access makes for fast mistakes, and there’s a kid sitting on the porch. 

“Ma’am, your neighbour called in a disturbance.”

“The neighbour is a nosy bitch,” the woman tells her. “Maybe she needs to mind her own business.”

“Still,” Nicole says, “I heard some arguing when I walked up.”

“Tommy gets in a mood, Officer. It’s nothing to be worried about.”

Nicole sighs. “Did Tommy bruise your face?”

“No.”

“Do you want to press charges?”

“Maybe you need to mind your own business, too,” the woman says, sounding more resigned than angry. But she slams the door just fine. The kid watches the drama, but doesn’t seem impressed. 

She crouches down. “Is Tommy your daddy?” Questioning a minor without parental consent isn’t the best idea, but some little inkling makes her think the woman inside won’t be overly fussed. The kid shakes his head.

“Does Tommy hit your mama?” Thinner ice here, but the kid doesn’t answer, just shrugs.

“Do Tommy or your mama hit you?” Another shrug. She sighs, and stands. There are no bruises or visible signs of neglect, and it’s not like a sworn officer of the law can strip a kid naked on his own front porch in hot pursuit of a family’s secrets.

She walks back to the cruiser, and pulls out one of the Trauma Teddies the Ladies Auxiliary knit. This one is brown, with a happy yellow pair of pants. Shirts being somehow unnecessary for bears, apparently. 

She crouches back down. “My name’s Nicole, and I’m a police officer. That means it’s my job to help people when they get hurt, or when they’re scared.” She shows a business card to the kid, and slides it down the bear’s pants. “If you get hurt or scared, you can call me. You know how to use a phone?” The kid shrugs yet again, but he clutches the teddy bear, running a soft ear against his lips. 

Sometimes being a good cop feels like trying to hold back the tide. But better a single finger in the dike than none at all.

“You said dike,” she whispers to the steering wheel, and laughs a little. Because why the fuck not? It’s funny.

 

*****  
The knock on the apartment door comes while Nicole is still unbuttoning her uniform blouse. She opens the door with the tails out and hanging down, showing off a vertical strip of undershirt. A nice, tight undershirt.

“Wowzer,” Waverly whispers, then snaps her eyes upwards. “I mean, hi! Hello.”

“You have good timing. I just got home,” Nicole tells her, grabbing the top of the door and leaning casually. _Lesbian, in Repose on Door_. It happens to make her shirt gap a little wider, and that happens to make Waverly’s eyes flick downwards again.

“I know. I was watching for you.” Waverly catches herself, and grimaces. “I promise you, it’s not creepy as I just made it sound. I just thought we should talk.”

“I get it,” Nicole says. Waverly isn’t moving towards her, so she backs into the room. “Why don’t you come inside?”

Waverly crosses the threshold, but stops again just inside, fidgeting her fingers against each other. 

“C’mon.” Nicole gestures her past. “Let’s sit down. I’ll get some beer.” 

“I’m glad you came,” Nicole says, once they’re situated. Waverly watches her own hands pick at the bottle label, and Nicole completely understands. It’s one thing to brass your way through kissing a pretty girl, and a whole ‘nother thing to sit on the far side of a couch and fill the silence gapping between them. “I was going to call you as soon as I finished changing, but face to face is better.”

“Face to face. Very missionary.” Waverly looks significantly at the couch, and makes an amused noise at the back of her throat. Nicole actually blushes a little. She opens her mouth, but Waverly is faster off the mark.

“I came here to ask you on a date.” Waverly’s voice is high and her breathing is fast, like she’s surfing the crest of her own breaking courage. “But I was waiting for you in my car, and I realized I don’t really know what you want. I just— I kind of attacked you last night. You didn’t get to say much.”

True. Partially because Nedley’s footsteps had rung down the hall, and Nicole had ejected Waverly with alacrity and terror, tossing her coat across the room and quick marching her back through the swinging gate. Waverly had laughed, and winked, but that was almost a full day ago. A brain like Waverly’s could process a whole lot of thoughts in 24 hours, and some of those would probably be doubt. 

“Trust me, I didn’t mind using my mouth for other things,” Nicole tells her. It makes Waverly smile, but it’s reserved. 

“That’s good, but I can’t ask you on a date if we’re not actually dating. And I realized maybe you don’t—”

“No!” Blurted out with strong emphasis, and very little precision. Shit. Waverly just frowns at her.

“I mean yes,” Nicole corrects, a little calmer. Waverly frowns harder.

“Um. Nicole, you just told me no means yes. To save us all confusion, how about this - I’d like to be your girlfriend. I’d like you to be mine. I’d like us to do what we did last night, and more with each other, and not with anyone else.” 

Nicole feels those words in a lot of places, but mainly in the center of a rippling surprise. This isn’t the script she had prepared. She is supposed to make the advances, and set up the dates. She’s older, and physically bigger, and she’s experienced, and how had gender roll bullshit _of all fucking things_ crept into her extremely homosexual brain, and shit she really needs to say something because Waverly is falling off the crest of that wave.

“You make me feel like that song, about my heart being a kick-drum,” Nicole finally manages.

“Is that a good thing?” Waverly asks, fast and panicked.

“It means I want all those things you want, and I admire your bravery.”

Waverly makes another sound at the back of her throat, like relief and happiness and maybe even pain are all rolled together inside her chest. Nicole reaches out and takes the beer out of her hand, setting it down on the floor with a clink. 

“You won’t be needing that.”

“Definitely not,” Waverly says, and lunges forward to climb her exactly like a tree. Kissing her like the apple of knowledge is somehow stuck behind her tonsils. It’s a little sweet, and a little not-sweet, and Nicole wants it all.

 

*****  
Arguments are inevitable. Given enough time, any two people will annoy each other. The trick is to learn how to walk each other back from the critical edge. She gathers the most unique peace offering she’s ever considered, but it seems to repair the damage her pride has caused. Repairs it better than expected. Waverly kissing her like this isn’t what she was aiming for, but it’s not something she’s going to complain about.

Nicole smiles as she lifts Waverly, and lays her down on the little twin bed. The face below hers looks nervous, and determined, and it’s all so fucking adorable she can barely breath. 

“Nic,” Waverly says, her adorable determination sliding into uncertainty. “Nic, I—”

“Please, please,” Nicole cuts her off, her open belt dangling like a wilted erection, “stop. Do not say you don’t know what to do, and I won’t say any words about showing you what to do. Okay?”

“O-kay, but, um—”

Nicole cuts her off again. “Sorry. But you can’t. You really can’t. I won’t let you. Someday you’re going to think back on this, and you’ll hate me for letting you do something so clichéd. That’s not how I want you to remember this, okay?”

“I don’t think I could ever hate you,” Waverly confesses, all low and quiet. 

“Well, thank God for that,” Nicole says, and leans down to kiss Waverly stupid. She’s always thought the medical student’s motto of ‘see one, do one, teach one’ works just as fine for the newly fledged homosexual, too.

Bisexual. Whatever. She’s just Waverly. A newly fledged Waverly, finding what she wants in the world.

Waverly ends up leaving fingerprint marks on her shoulders, but afterwards Nicole is the one who goes graceless and shaky. She may have heard Waverly whisper something to Wynonna, in those moments Willa was holding a gun on her own chest. But it was an intense moment, and she’s not certain. And even if she had heard right, and even if it wasn’t just Waverly in the heat of the moment, it’s still too early to admit this might be the very last time she has first time sex.

She stifles the words by rolling herself under Waverly and kisses her stupid all over again. Drawing the whole thing out a little longer. 

Eventually she’ll map the body covering hers, and Waverly will map her back, and they’ll use their new knowledge to build something rooted and elemental. They’ll know how to make it fast, or slow it all down, and they’ll know the right amount of dirty and sweet. And Nicole wants those moments. It’s just that she wants them exactly as much as she wants to savor falling in love for the last time.

 

*****  
Nedley stands at her desk, and makes noises about how sheriffs, not deputy sheriffs but Sheriffs-full-stop, make a point to socialize with the townsfolk. So Nicole makes the point. Shorty’s features heavily. She figures it’s okay, because Nedley is far guiltier of the exact same sin.

“Here you go, Nic.” 

The town, and Shorty’s itself has swollen with summer tourists, and that includes behind the bar. The woman pushing a plate towards her is a tall and blowzy fake blond who carries the aura of tragedy and hard living. She’ll be gone in six months. Her name is Sarah, of course. Nicole has found that most bit players in life are named Sarah.

Nicole takes the plate. “Hey, thanks Sarah, but I prefer Nicole.”

“Oh, sure. Sorry.”

“No worries,” Nicole says easily. “I can’t hold a grudge against such a pretty face. Besides, I’ve never mentioned it, right?” She winks, just a little saucy, and Sarah looks her up and down before moving off.

A snort from offsides brings her back. Hands on hips, Waverly is giving her a sourly arch look from the service side of the bar. Her shirt is tied off the back, and her cowboy boots give her an extra inch in height. Nicole wonders what it would be like to back her against the nearest convenient wall, and have her wicked way underneath that shirt.

“Has anyone told you that you’ve got a little bit of a gladhand?” Waverly asks.

“You heard that, did you?”

“More like I saw it.”

Nicole chews a bite of her sandwich.

“I’ve called you Nic,” Waverly says like a challenge.

“I know,” Nicole draws it out.

“You didn’t tell me to stop.”

“Nope.”

“But you told Sarah to stop.”

“Yup.” She spins an insolent little pop into the final phoneme, adoring the wrinkle of frustration in Waverly’s brow. She darts a quick glance around, and stands on the foot rail with a distinct thrill of spontaneity. She threads her fingers into Waverly’s bun, and kisses her like a power ballad. Wet and sloppy and public. Thank fucking god for civvies.

“You’re different,” she answers the question Waverly hasn’t asked. Can’t ask, because she’s busy making soft and urgent noises deep in her throat and gripping Nicole’s biceps. Regretfully, Nicole pulls back. In a small town there’s allowable spontaneity, and then there is spectacle.

She eats another bite of sandwich under Waverly’s vaguely slack jaw captivation, chewing with grave innocence, until the other woman recovers her senses, spinning away with a huff.

*  
“Why am I different?”

Six hours later and Waverly looks a little manic, staged so dramatically in the apartment doorway. Nicole looks at her sweatpants, and thinks vaguely about putting real pants back on. 

“Because you’re _you_ ,” she finally says, with the best honesty she can dredge forward. Sweatpants will have to suffice.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I like when you call me Nic,” she shrugs.

“But why me? Why me, in particular. Why am I different?” Waverly’s voice has gone a little high and a little tight, and Nicole realizes the situation is far beyond her original intention. She hikes herself up from the couch, and rests her hands on Waverly’s shoulders. Waverly looks at the ground. 

“What’s actually going on, Waverly?”

“Never mind. It’s nothing,” Waverly mumbles, twisting a little.

“It sure seems like something,” Nicole points out. Waverly settles, but switches to snuffling at the ground. Nicole guides her over to the couch.

“I just don’t understand,” Waverly blurts out. “I never have.”

“Understand what?” Nicole tries to grasp the threads of this conversation, but the warp and weft of Waverly Earp has never been purely straight forward.

“You flirted with me the very first time we met. You flirted, and said you didn’t like to wait once you knew what you wanted. But I was dating someone. I was dating a guy, Nic. Nicole. I was really, really unavailable in a couple of important ways.”

“I know,” Nicole says.

“So why even try?” Waverly’s question has the quiet exhaustion of long suppressed tension. It surges something sweet and heavy through Nicole’s chest. 

“I couldn’t not,” is all she says. “I knew you were dating someone. I knew that someone was a guy. But you’re too smart, and too pretty, and too goddamn determined not to try.” 

“But why me? Why risk so much, and try so hard for me. I’m just…ordinary.”

“No,” Nicole insists. “You’re fucking extraordinary. And I’m incredibly lucky.”

She _is_ incredibly lucky. She’d wooed Waverly with every ounce of her confidence, but she’d known the odds. The odds were humiliation, the deep kind. Or worse, a starvation diet of sordid one night stands, stolen while Champ rode circuit. Waverly whispering that she can’t keep doing such tainted things, even as she makes Nicole pant and claw at the sheets. A pathetic recreation of _Brokeback Mountain_ with 100 percent more lesbians.

Thinking too hard on actually getting the girl makes her nervous. It spirals her thoughts towards something that might be fate, or destiny. Or it might just be proof of God. Pre-Purgatory Nicole would have rolled her eyes, but the Earp curse has ripped away a lot of her previous assumptions about how the world operates. Why not her doubt, too?

“But what if it wears off, or something?” Waverly pulls her back from her vague and dissatisfying superstitions.

“If what wears off?”

“Whatever makes you think I’m worth all this. If I don’t know what that is, then I can’t know what to keep doing. Or what not to do.”

“Waverly, all you have to do is just be yourself.” 

“Sometimes I don’t necessarily know who that is,” Waverly says.

Nicole takes Waverly’s face between her hands, and tells her that every single living person feels that sort of doubt. Doing the best they can while stumbling around in the dark, accumulating bruises and wisdom. 

Then she makes Waverly dinner, setting the table with placemats and a candle in the middle. Even her foolish audacity had never dared to hope for domesticity, and she revels in this just as much as she revels in Waverly’s sweet weight pressing her down and holding. 

Her words hadn’t truly driven the shadow from behind Waverly’s face, but that is okay. She can try again tomorrow. And the day after that. Into whatever eternity God and Waverly decide she deserves.

 

*****  
What Nicole needs is a strategy. A perfect one. The kind they must teach American soldiers at their terrifyingly named War College. Too bad she’d mostly just drank and fornicated in college. She has no strategy, and apparently no game.

Finally, she just sits on Waverly’s stomach, concentrates briefly, and stands. Waverly stares up at her like a splayed and flummoxed starfish.

Nicole hums with satisfaction as she sits on the opposite side of the couch, arranging limbs until their legs are origamied together on the middle cushion, propping her head on the couch arm so she can read. 

She’s never been much of a reader, but Waverly likes to lay on the couch and learn things, and Nicole likes to be near Waverly as she lays on the couch and learns things. She’s decided this Tom Clancy guy ain’t so bad.

“Nicole?” Waverly asks her slowly.

“Hrm,” she hums deep in her chest, concentrating on the book.

“Did you just fart on me?”

“Yes. Yes I did.” She flicks a page over. Waverly makes a disbelieving sound, and narrows her eyes.

“Why?”

Nicole looks over the edge of the book. “Why?”

“Yes. Why.”

“I forgot you don’t have any brothers.”

Waverly’s next question is in the form of a glare. Jeopardy would not approve. Nicole flicks another page, far faster than she can actually read. Waverly kicks her foot.

“If you have brothers, you’d understand that farting on you means I love you.”

Waverly squeals, loud enough to be legitimately startling, and jackknifes onto Nicole’s end of couch. Flopping onto her torso hard enough to bend ribs and plucking the poor book from her hands with a casual flick. Her face is right above Nicole’s, and she is smiling, smiling, smiling.

“You love me?”

Nicole pushes her hands into Waverly’s hair. Doesn’t even pretend to resist the compulsion.

“Yes. Of course.”

Waverly kisses her, and Nicole ends up making many, many indiscreet noises. She tries not to care much that Waverly didn’t say it back.

 

*****  
Purgatory isn’t precisely what Nicole expected. She’d steeled herself for cutting eyes and low mutters. Instead, the town simply folds around her union with Waverly. A strange mix of acceptance and deep reserve that makes enough room for them.

Outside Purgatory, things are different. Outside Waverly isn’t a birthright citizen, and Nicole can’t ride her hometown sweetheart coattails.

“Dyke,” floats over them on the wind rustling the county fair. Nicole stiffens, guilty and burning. Her fingers unraveling from Waverly’s without her conscious will. But Waverly just smiles, and walks backwards with twin middle fingers lofted. “Look all you want, dick face. It’s the only time you’re ever gonna see two girls at once.”

“Waverly,” Nicole hisses, pulling her away. “That’s not safe!” But Waverly is not the same as Nicole. She grew up under the shadow of the Earp curse, and lives under it still. She cut her teeth on dead fathers, unregistered shotguns, and the veil of the arcane.

In the grocery store line, Nicole puts herself between Waverly and the disapproving sniffing from behind them, but Waverly leans around Nicole’s elbow. She smiles with heartbreaking sweetness and flicking her tongue between her upraised vagina fingers. Nicole laughs in astonished startlement. 

The woman huffs, and finds a new checker line. Waverly looks back at Nicole with perfect soberness, and says “it’s what’s for dinner” with carrying clarity. Nicole convulses in horror and mirth, and thinks maybe she could learn to be more like Waverly.

 

*****  
Nicole is on patrol the first time she sees the farm. Or, she’s on the aimless driving that Nedley has informed her is patrolling. Back in the city, she’d followed grids, and schedules, and specific patterns. The only thing she has as a deputy is a vague lode stone that pulls her in unexplained directions.

It regularly pulls her past the Nash farm. Always for nothing. It’s a mean, tangled parcel of land on 9th Concession that shows no signs of life. There are barely even human tracks in the snow. That’s until spring melt brings a passel of cows to one of the muddy pastures. 

Nicole eyeballs the accommodations in the pasture, and drives off.

“Sheriff, there are cows in the Nashs’ upper pasture. Very pregnant cows.”

Nedley sighs at his paperwork, but he does gesture her into his office proper. She invites her own self into a chair. “They do it every year. And before you start preaching at me, I’ve tried it all before, Haught. Animal agriculture is immune from provincial anti-cruelty laws, as well as duty of care laws.”

“I did 4H, sir.”

“Well, you’re Canadian, ain’tcha?” he shoots back, gruffly. She crosses her arms. 

“That pasture obviously doesn’t have drainage. Every one of those ladies is going to get foot rot. And god knows if the Nash’s are going to deworm and inoculate them. It’s not just anti-cruelty, sir. If they intend to sell the milk, then it’s public health.”

Nedley sighs at her. “Look, Haught. I freely admit that the Nash brothers don’t have an extra ounce of caring across their collective souls, but they know how to ride the line. They’ll inoculate the cows, and they’ll spread enough straw to prevent foot rot. Okay?”

Now Nicole sighs. It’s not okay. But it’s also simply what it is. At the end of the day, Nicole believes in the rule of law, and the Nash brothers aren’t breaking it. “Yeah,” she says, climbing out of the chair. “You want the door closed behind me?”

“Nicole,” Nedley cautions, instead of answering. “Just, you might want to avoid their farm until later in the summer. Okay?”

“Okay,” she says. And honest to might-actually-exist God, she intended to heed the advice. She doesn’t sense the hole in the middle of Nedley’s advice. It simply does not occur to her.

She manages six weeks, before breaking. Doing a slow roll by, blowing out relieved breath when she sees the pasture is empty. 

No. Correction. The upper pasture is empty. The lower pasture is not. 

She thinks, she really and truly thinks about just driving away. It’s not illegal. It’s none of her business. She presses the accelerator, then slams the brakes so hard the seat belt lock clicks. “Fuck,” she bangs the steering wheel with the flat of her hand. “Fuck. Fuck.” 

She yanks the door open, vaults the pasture fence, and immediately regrets everything. The softness underfoot is not just mud. It’s rotting straw and manure, macerated into a fetid liquid sludge. 

The bullock calf she’d seen from the car is laying in the mess at full stretch, tongue lolling out. Nicole thinks maybe he’s dead, but his liquid brown eyes roll towards her approach.

“Hey little guy,” she coos, kneeling beside him. He raises his head, and tries to lick her. 

“Little boy. Little darling,” she tells him. “You’re okay, you’re fine.” She runs her hands and eyes over him. Swaths of his hide have sloughed into open sores, and the ground beyond his hind end is sick with blood. He’s covered in flies, and his ribs stick through dusty fur.

Nicole rubs his head and fondles his ears. Stroking him until he wuffles, and lays his head back into the stinking muck. Nicole makes a noise she hadn’t meant to and yanks her shirt over her head. Folding it up and laying it under the calf’s head. He makes weak noises at the movement, and she mutters apologies into his twitching ear.

He closes his eyes. She unlocks the rifle from the cruiser’s safety rack. She stands over him as she says “please, _please_ ” like a prayer and pulls the trigger. The calf jerks, his eyes spasming wide. Nicole shivers in the heat, and breathes hard through her teeth. 

She breathes like that for a long time, until she can unclench her hands from the rifle, and turn away, and _shit_ there’s another calf. 

She frowns at it. Maybe the kill shot had flushed it from the little two-stall barn at the far end of the pasture? She edges towards the structure, until she’s near enough to see that it is swarming with blow flies.

“Please,” she moans, for herself this time, but she doesn’t need the damnation of Leviticus to know God isn’t going to help her. 

The first sally doesn’t go so well. The sweet rot makes her reel back, choking and wretching. She pulls her undershirt up until she can breathe through the hem, and makes it through the door. There are four more calves inside. She forces herself to check each of them, but they’re beyond the need for bullets. 

She stumbles out, gulping the relatively fresh air. The final calf has moved back towards the lower, muckier end of the pasture. It tries a few tottering steps as she nears, but it’s a token fight. 

There’s blood down this second calf’s hind legs, but she’s upright and lacks the weeping sores her brother had sported. Nicole rubs her hands soothingly against the calf’s poll, and it leans into the touch. Mother starved, she supposes. And so thoroughly neglected by the Nash brothers that it isn’t afraid of humans.

“Hey little miss. What are we going to do with you?” The calf leans heavily against her. Nicole notices that she has beautiful eyelashes. Long and drooping down, like the calf can finally relax.

“Shit,” Nicole mumbles, easing the calf back. Its eyes shoot open, and she bawls with a wide open mouth.

“I can’t, little girl. There are laws. There are so many, many laws.” The calf blinks at her. A single slow sweep of her lashes, before lowering her head between her feet. She makes a tiny bleating noise. 

“Fuuuuuck,” Nicole sighs. She starts to key the mic, but thinks better of it, and pulls her phone out of her pocket. Public record, and all.

“Yeah, Lonnie. It’s Nicole. Listen, I need a favour. A big favour. I need the transport van. And some, um, some rope, maybe? And that big tarp from the back shed. And…wait, have you got a pen?”

Nicole spends 40 minutes pacing, eyeing the house for sudden Nashes and working herself into a fine state. She sweats through her undershirt before collapsing down, leaning back against the lower bar of the pasture fencing. The heifer calf shoves her head through the rails, gently lipping at her hair.

“I’m not your mama,” Nicole tells her. The calf snorts warm calf breath into her hair.

Lonnie pulls the transport wagon onto the road siding, and stares at her with clear disapproval. She smile up at him weakly.

“I have no idea where to even start,” she says. Possibly one of the most honest thing she’s ever said.

“Where is your shirt, Haught?”

“My shirt?”

“Yes,” Lonnie says with a vast and obvious reserve of calm. “I’m assuming you don’t want your properly name tagged uniform blouse to be left behind whatever is happening here.”

“Oh. Yeah. Good point.” She gestures vaguely into the pasture. To his credit, Lonnie only stares at her for a few deep seconds before breaking. He clambers over the rail with country kid ease, and a pair of muck boots Nicole would frankly kill a stranger for. He brings her shirt back using two outstretched fingers, and drops it over the top rail next to her.

“Thanks,” she says, enduring more lipping.

“Nicole, are we stealing this calf?” he finally asks.

“No. We are taking a material witness into protective custody, and relocating her to a safe house.”

“Yeah,” Lonnie says, squatting down by the calf, running his hands with gentle expertise down her body. She looks at him with startled suspicion. 

“Tell that to the calf,” Lonnie says, hoisting. The scene explodes.

Later, Nicole will decide that the level of both volume and thrashing that occurs is exactly like the time she dislocated her ankle. The bruises will show for weeks, but the moment of acquisition is something her brain simply chooses not to remember. 

Though, it does serve as final proof that the Nash brothers aren’t on the property. No living creature could overlook that amount of swearing and screaming.

She comes back to herself while crouching in the back of the transport van, holding a makeshift halter as she and the calf both slide across the tarp during each turn. The calf has her eyes screwed closed - with those astonishing eyelashes fanned out perfectly - and her mouth stretched into one long and calamitous wail of protest.

Nicole has decided to name her Daisy. 

Daisy cuts the noise the instant Lonnie cuts the engine, and Nicole nearly cries. They both blink as the rear doors are yanked open.

“Jesus, I couldn’t even hear myself think, and I was in the cab. How was it back here?”

“What?” Nicole asks. 

Lonnie just sighs, or at least his shoulders move in a sighing movement. He nudges Nicole aside, and hoists Daisy out. Once on _terra firma_ the calf ducks her head, nibbling a dandelion.

Nicole frowns down at her. Should she have named her Dandelion? Dandy?

Lonnie breaks her contemplation. “I’m leaving. I’m afraid of Wynonna, and also you smell worse than a shithouse rat.”

Nicole can’t really argue with that. She watches the transport van leave, and looks glumly down at Daisy. She doesn’t have a key for the paddock. She’s going to have to boost Daisy over the rail, and she’s going to have to do it herself. She’s taller than most women, and she’s got more muscle, but Daisy at mebbe six weeks is already close to 70kg.

Well, nothing for it but to try. There’s a lot of groaning, and some deep lesbian grunting she kind of wishes Waverly could have witnessed, but she gets the calf off the ground. Nicole is starting to think she’ll get away everything, that she’ll be able to treat the calf’s arrival as some sort of spontaneous miracle, when a delicate throat clears itself behind her.

“Nicole,” Waverly says.

“Hiiii,” Nicole wavers a trilling tone of utter guilt. “Um, this is, um, Waverly this is Daisy. Daisy, Waverly.”

Waverly flicks her fingers in a politely bewildered little wave. Daisy sweeps her ridiculous eyelashes, and bawls something tiny and precious.

“Oh,” Waverly squeaks, springing forward to commune nostril to nostril with the calf while Nicole holds her up and does absolutely no lesbian grunting. Finally, Waverly looks back up, pupils wide with adoration and some calf slobber on her cheek. 

“I have no idea what’s happening, but I love this calf almost as much as I love you.”

Suddenly it doesn’t matter so much that Nicole is still covered in mud, blood, and shit. It does not matter that her shoulders may be slowly dislocating from their sockets. She hoists Daisy over the rail on a surge of pure fucking oxytocin and red-tinged lust. The calf takes a few tottering steps, and bawls back at her.

“We’re parents!” Waverly thrills. “Though, I suppose most people would’ve started with a dog.” She wraps an arm around Nicole’s waist.

“Covered in literal shit here, Wave,” Nicole points out, trying to jerk away.

Waverly just squeezes tighter. “You’re a goddamn hometown hero, you know. Kind to children, animals, and stray Earps.”

Nicole grins, and starts to explain exactly how stray Earps can reward such kindness in strangers but she’s interrupted by a cry of “ _what the actual fuck!_ ” floating down from the lichgate.

“Well,” Waverly points out as Wynonna stalks towards them, “at least this time it’s just stray animals, and not her catching us having sex.”

Nicole is honestly not sure which activity is better, or worse, for her longevity.

 

******  
“Haught,” Nedley calls her across the bullpen.

“Sheriff?” she asks, standing in his door.

“Suspected meth lab, out on 12th Concession. Go check it out.”

“Lonnie—” she starts, longing for coffee and her desk. Nedley waves it away. 

“Would find a way to kill himself, and you know it. But take him with you.”

“That don’t make no sense,” she tells her boss, childhood accent slipping out. It’s the stupid hat. It has a way with her vocal cords. Nedley flaps it away with a lackadaisical hand. 

“I know things you can’t even guess at, whippersnapper. Do what I tell you.”

Nicole snorts, and takes Lonnie with her. They pull up outside the dilapidated trailer on the dilapidated road a few miles from dilapidated nowhere. On a whim, she whelps the siren, and like some sort of Three Stooges episode three men burst out a side door.

“Hey!” Nicole yanks the cruiser door open. “Sheriff's office. Stop!” 

The first two just keep rabbiting. The last guy stops long enough to blow her a kiss, and toss an open lighter back into the trailer.

She catches him, of course. She’s a three sport jock and he cooks meth. Still, she’s panting, and has to blow hair out of her face. She uses the knob of his ulna to spring the handcuffs closed, and hooks his ankle to get his ass onto the ground right next to the two Lonnie has cuffed and stashed. 

The guy grunts, and she and Lonnie give each other hard grins over his head.

“Hell of a thing, huh?” Lonnie says, rolling a shoulder towards the burning lab. Huge parts of it are spewing astonishing amounts of flame, flickering and roaring like a campfire on steroids. Burning now purple, now blue, now with the voice of the tempest.

“Wow,” Nicole whispers, knowing that she is small, and that nature is vast. Gaping like a yokel as that vast and breathing arrogance casually flicks towards the open door of her cruiser.

“No!” Nicole wails, surging forward with visions of vehicle reports dancing in her head. But the heat is intense and the sparks landing on her pants make her dance back gasping. 

“Goddamnit,” she screams, patting frantically at the scorching of her pants. “Shit. Fuck. Fuck you fire!” She hurls a pinecone as hard as she can into the moaning flames.

“Yeah, you show it, Haught,” Lonnie calls from his safe distance. “Really dominate that fire.”

Nicole breaths in slowly, slowly through her nose. She breathes out using a ten count. “Okay,” she says. “Get on the radio, call in the codes. The fire, and we’ll need the wrecker.”

Lonnie nods, but Nicole gives him a threatening finger. “If you say anything besides ‘roll trucks’ or ’backup cruiser’ I will personally rip your testicles off and feed them to my cow. Right?”

“Sure, Haught,” Lonnie says, but in a tone that certainly implies he’ll consider one testicle fair exchange for the exclusive on this story. Nicole bares her teeth at him. Lonnie actually winks.

“Officer,” one of the cuffed goons calls from his seat on the ground.

“Shut up,” Nicole tells him.

“How much paperwork do you think that’s going to need?” Lonnie jerks his chin towards the burning cruiser, smiling like he’s won the lottery.

“A lot,” Nicole mourns.

Lonnie laughs, which doesn’t delight her. “Glad it won’t be me.”

“Hey, but, Officer,” the suspect tries again. “You need—”

“I told you to shut up,” Nicole tells him. “You’re not in the best position to be telling me what I need.”

“Right, but—”

“Haught, can you feel your lips?”

Nicole looks at Lonnie, and the gentle, happy puzzlement on his face. _Oh_ , she thinks. _Oh, shit._

“Burning meth, Officer. You know, the stuff you smoke,” the goon points out. He sounds a little righteously hurt about it, too.

“What a great day!” Lonnie cries to the sky, throwing his arms wide to embrace the entirely of nature.

Nicole keys her mic, and calls for everything she’s told Lonnie, and adds in the entire complement of Purgatory’s ambos. 

*  
“Deputy Haught, do you have any idea how much a police cruiser costs?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. Sir.” She’s standing stiffly in the hospital corridor, staring straight ahead with a rigidity she hasn’t used since graduating the provincial academy.

“Nicole,” Nedley softens, “just, at ease, okay.”

“Am I being suspended?” Nicole prefers band-aids be ripped off fast. Even the ones that will crush your soul.

“What? No!” Nedley seems genuinely astonished. 

“I ruined a cruiser. I endangered a fellow deputy.”

“Hell, who hasn’t?” Nedley says. He sighs, and scrubs a hand across his face. “I ain’t firing you, Haught. I’ve finally trained everyone to put the toilet seat down. God knows they’d revert if I kicked your tail down the road.”

Nicole slumps against the door to Lonnie’s room. Nedley shuffles his hat in a gentle circle.

“Just, go home, okay. Lonnie’s going to be fine, and we can figure the paperwork out tomorrow.”

She sighs, and turns to leave, but Nedley’s “deputy” calls her back. 

“Sir?”

“I, ah, just wanted to point out, traumatic day and all, you need some new britches.”

She looks at the constellation of burn holes she’d accumulated trying to save the cruiser, and knows with dreadful certainty that she’ll spend the next eternity being called Hot Pants. She also sees that her jaunty pink underwear is showing through one hole.

“Right,” she says, twisting on one heel with regulation perfection, and marching straight out.

She drives to the homestead, but pulls the cruiser up next to the paddock and sits on the upper rail. Daisy ambles over and gives her a proper adolescent moo. 

“All grown up,” Nicole tells her cow, pulling a molasses chew from the treat box. Despite the words, the rough tongue across her palm feels like something from childhood. That hazy time back when her family had loved her enough to provide enrichment activities. 

“Jesus Christ. Stop being such a pathetic asshole,” she whispers fiercely.

Daisy at 300 kilograms has grown into her eyelashes, but has developed hauteur. “Sorry, little miss,” Nicole tells her. “I wasn’t talking to you like that.” 

*  
“You’re home!”

Waverly’s yodel is the only warning Nicole gets before a compactly lithe body barrels into her own.

“Hrungh,” Nicole offers weakly. 

“Hi,” Waverly grins. Wrists locked behind her head, beaming at her. 

“Hi,” Nicole says, and waits for Waverly’s kiss to make the day melt away. For the first time, it doesn’t work. Mission control reports back a no-go. Nicole ends the kiss, and nudges Waverly back just a little.

“Sorry, long day.”

“What happened?”

“The very elements were against me,” Nicole moans.

“Poor baby,” Waverly coos, pressing a kiss into her neck, hand drifting down to pull against the tuck of her uniform shirt. “Let me make it better.”

“I’m stupid sweaty, Waves. I smell like smoke. I really need to take a shower.”

“Sure,” Waverly agrees, nipping against her collar bone. It hurts, and the sting feels like pure liquid fury bursting its dam. 

“Ow. Fuck, Waverly,” She pries the roving hand from her body, pushing it back against Waverly’s chest. “Back off, okay? You don’t need to climb all over me the instant I get home.”

“Oh.” Waverly breaths it like a revelation, moving backwards until her butt hits the cabinets behind her, her arm stretching out between them. “Right. Sorry. I’m sorry.”

For one hot and long moment, it feels good. She wears a badge and a gun, and people are meant to obey her. She has the right.

“No.” Nicole drops her wrist. Waverly wraps her own fingers around it, and pulls it against her chest. “I’m sorry. I’m the one that’s sorry. You didn’t deserve that. I just had a very bad day.” 

The guilt is slow flowing and molten. What a monster she is, to make Waverly stand like that. Her shoulders cupped forward around the hands she’s pressed to her chest. Her brow creased with a watchful tension Nicole has never seen before. 

Then again, she’s never been this particular level of asshole before. “I’m sorry,” she says again. For lack of anything better.

“Um. I could make you some tea, while you shower,” Waverly says softly, eyes flicking away. “Or, um, do you want to be alone? I could go.”

“No, don’t go. Just give me half an hour, okay? I’ll take a shower, and you can make tea, and we can start again. If you’re willing.”

Waverly nods, but doesn’t move from the cabinets. Nicole lingers a second, wanting Waverly to see her true contrition, but the other woman keeps her eyes down and slides past her towards the kettle.

She showers, and drinks her tea. Waverly drifts around, just outside Nicole’s personal bubble, which seems to have been pegged to match the wingspan of her reach. She doesn’t nudge into the v of Nicole’s legs when handing the tea over. She doesn’t press her foot into Nicole’s calf as they eat dinner. She takes the long way around the table while clearing the plates.

Finally, Nicole kneels in front of the couch, where Waverly has curled up so small. She lays a hand against her neck, and feels hollow when the muscles under her fingers jump in a startled twitch. Waverly looks at her, and there is still that tension in her brow. A watchfulness that strokes a bony finger down Nicole’s intuition. She pushes it away. All she wants to do is bury her head in Waverly’s lap until everything is okay again.

“Can I tell you about my day?” she asks, smoothing a thumb across the fold in Waverly’s brow. It finally eases, and Waverly pulls her into the couch.

 

*****  
Wynonna hangs a rainbow flag on the porch of the homestead. 

Well, Wynonna looks offended as a wet cat when asked if she hung the flag, but honestly who else could it be? It certainly wasn’t Doc, still befuddled by the entire concept of lesbians, and the very thought of Dolls is laughable.

Nicole stands behind Waverly as they look at the bright flag. Waverly shrugs, and turns away.

Later, Nicole rests her poorly wiped face on Waverly’s stomach. Her forearm burns like a sonofabitch, and her lingual frenulum is sore, and she is smugger than she has been in a long, long time.

“Waverly,” she moans into the sticky skin below her cheek. “Waverly.” 

Clever fingers smooth her hair back, tidying it behind her ears. “What, baby?”

“I need to tell you something,” she informs the belly button in front of her. She cranes up, and meets Waverly’s eyes looking down. 

“Anything,” Waverly says, a little wrinkle of suspense between her brows.

“It’s important,” Nicole insists, eyes finding the window, or the desk, or anything that isn’t Waverly. The fingers in her hair slow.

“Tell me.”

“I—” Nicole swallows, letting her voice falter and keeping quarter profile to Waverly’s steady gaze.

“Nicole, what? It’s okay, you can tell me.” The fingers slide across to cradle her face, trying to pull her back to center. She follows the tugging, biting her lip, letting it go with a little pop of resolve. The way people do when they’re seconds away from spilling secrets - _he touched me_ ; or _there's someone else_ ; or _I let her die._

“I need to tell you that I’m straight.”

For one second, one single and crystalline second, Waverly gapes. Mouth open, eyes wide. Then her eyes slit down, and she lets her head thump back to the pillow. “You’re an asshole, is what you are.”

Nicole presses her insincere apology into the skin below her lips. Waverly’s fingers weave back into her hair, and Nicole drifts, wondering why humans can’t purr.

A not quite gentle tug makes her skim back up the body underneath her, shifting off to the side, so she can sling a leg across her hips and prop her head on a fist. She traces the plane of Waverly’s cheeks, and then the bow of her lips.

“Mmm,” Waverly says. Maybe humans could purr, after all?

“I lied, a little. I’m actually really gay. A lot gay. So gay. For you, baby. I’m gay for you.”

Waverly smiles. 

Nicole has made a concentrated study of the ways in which Waverly smiles. A doctoral level course she’s augmented and supplemented with every training class she’s ever taken on body language and nonverbal communication.

This is not the wide open beam of a surprise midday visit. It’s not the indulgent grin of a sweatpants Friday night on the couch. It’s definitely not the wicked curve of Waverly’s hands unbuckling her belt. This smile has a stitch inside it.

Waverly takes her free hand, playing idly with her fingers. Nicole makes her face open, and her body attentive, and waits to see what will happen.

“Do you know what I am?” Waverly eventually asks. 

Ah. Right. Of course. “No,” Nicole says honestly.

Waverly’s fingers trace each of hers. A double circuit worth, and a quick exploration of her palm before she asks, “When did you know?”

“That I was gay? I suspected when I was twelve. I knew by the time I was seventeen.”

“ _How_ did you know?”

“Fire drill, sixth grade,” Nicole says. “The all clear bell rang, and we were all filing back up the stairs in those stupid lines they make kids stand in. Katrina Benning’s butt was directly in front of me for all three flights, and I knew that I liked it, and knew that liking it meant something.”

“When you were twelve?”

“Yes,” Nicole confirms. “That’s my first memory of suspecting. As for finally knowing; it was more about just admitting what I already knew.”

“I don’t have a Katrina Benning,” Waverly admits, like it’s some kind of flaw. “I don’t have any of that. When I was twelve, I thought I’d marry Champ.”

“Okay,” Nicole tells her, putting as much casual neutrality into the word as possible. “So, maybe you aren’t gay.”

Waverly flashes instantly to stricken, the casual neutrality having pretty much no effect. “But _you’re_ gay,” she wails, with an edge of true panic. 

“Yes. Very true. I’m so incredibly gay. Yes. But that doesn’t mean _you_ have to be gay. Maybe you’re bi. Or queer. Or pan. Or! Maybe I’m the one and only woman who will ever do it for you. Ever. Which I’m totally fine with, by the way.” She waggles her eyebrows, and puts on her best comic leer. Waverly does not laugh. Just looks at her with pained uncertainty. 

Nicole issues a directorial redirect. “Waverly Earp, do you like spending time with me?”

“Yes,” Waverly says, fast and certain.

“Okay. And you like when I spend time with you?”

“Yes.”

“And you like mooshing your bits against my bits, right?”

“Yes.” Waverly gives her an eye roll, with maybe the barest hint of a little blush. Adorable.

“Then for right now, what you are is Waverly, who likes Nicole. Sometimes naked.” She ponders. “Sometimes with handcuffs.”

“Is that enough?” Waverly asks, searching her face.

“Sure,” Nicole shrugs.

“It doesn’t feel like enough.”

Nicole reaches inside one more time, trying to find exactly the right words. “Here’s the deal; finding your label feels good. It gives you a place to stand, and other people standing with you, and that’s powerful. But on another level labels don’t actually matter all that much. The label doesn’t define what you like. It’s your liking that defines the label. So maybe you are gay. Or maybe you’re somewhere else on the scale, or continuum, or whatever it is the kids are calling it these days.”

She runs the pad of her finger down that heartbreaking jawline. If it was anyone, _anyone_ besides Waverly she’d gag at this sort of moment, or call it fake. But it is Waverly, so she says, “None of that changes what you and I have.”

Waverly sighs, like it’s all too much and far too little, all at the same time.

“It just takes time,” Nicole offers. 

“Mmm,” Waverly hums noncommittally, then quirks an eyebrow up.

“Handcuffs?”

Nicole grins her very best grin.

 

*****  
Nicole makes her 50th arrest, pushed over the edge by the rodeo weekend, and the boys who once tied tampons to her duty bag throw her a party with cupcakes and bourbon. They alternate licking frosting with belting stinging shots of bottom shelf booze. 

Nicole recreates Lonnie’s _king of the world_ moment from the Methamphetamine Incident, and they all laugh until they fall onto their drunk asses. She’s decanted at the homestead by the designated survivor. Blinking and smiling at Waverly, who narrows her eyes at the smell of alcohol, but melts when Nicole kisses her.

“I have friends!” she warbles into Waverly’s neck.

“What you’re going to have is a hangover.” Waverly rides the line between irritation and affection better than anyone.

Nicole nods. She will have a hangover, but that’s okay. She has tomorrow off. She’s going to text her friends about the size of her hangover, and commune with her cow, and get Waverly into compromising situations. It’s more life than she ever expected, and she wants to hold on with both hands.

 

*****  
Nicole takes Waverly to dinner. At a diner. It’s super classy. 

She reminds Waverly of the inherent classiness at a minimum of once a minute. Sometimes more. She takes the eye rolls and shoulder swats as the price of Waverly’s attention. She thinks she bears up quite manfully. Lesbianfully?

She orders eggs and potatoes and hash. When it comes, she swirls the plate together until everything reaches equal distribution, garnished artistically with ketchup and hot sauce. She slits her eyes nearly closed with unexaggerated pleasure at the first forkful. Waverly watches, and shudders.

“No meat at home. Meat whenever I want, not at home,” she quotes the rules, making sure to hit her dinner companion with a full display of dimples. Waverly is sitting beside her on the bench seat, and she has to fully turn her neck to get a solid visual. She uses the shielding to lean close, but Waverly dodges.

“Lips that have touched animal products shall never touch mine,” she says, squirming away.

Nicole forks up a large bite, and chews purposefully, with excellent smacking noises. Waverly very pointedly does not look, and chews her toast. Nicole thinks that when she finally earns her kiss, it will taste like lemon curd. Oh god, how Nicole dearly loves lemon curd.

The fight doesn’t reach them until after the plates have been cleared, and they are sipping coffee. Waverly is slumped half under the table, boots up on the opposite bench and grinning. She’s grinning up at Nicole, who also has her boots on the opposite bench, but doesn’t have to slump. They are holding hands in the space between their bodies, sheltered but not secret. Nicole is letting everything she feels show on her face, because she knows that Waverly likes to see it.

The words aren’t distinct, but the low and hissing quality catches the ear and makes the brain take notice. The distinct sounds of a couple fighting in full view of society. Gauche, but Nicole can ignore it. Should have ignored it. Wanted to ignore it. But she glanced over anyway, pulled along by some baseline human instinct, joined immediately by newer instincts the provincial academy had worked hard to beat into her.

It’s a man and a woman, at a table not too far away. The man leans close to the woman, his head down and his eyes up. Tapping his points into the table with a rough finger. The woman sits very still, and keeps her eyes down. The man shakes her elbow, but the woman shrinks down and murmurs something that makes him fling it away. She winces.

Nicole tenses. Her slow twitch muscles ready to walk over, and ask these fine citizens what the trouble might be. Isn’t it time to settle down, and just enjoy their classy diner dinner? She isn’t in uniform, but her badge is clipped to her belt.

Except Waverly has somehow drifted into the far corner of the booth, a particular tightness in the lines around her eyes. It pulls at her, that tension. She’s only seen it once before, but she remembers. She purses her lips, parsing what she knows against what she suspects.

“Let’s go.” She pulls Waverly out of the booth, putting herself between her girlfriend and the dangerous table. The man’s eyes track them, and Nicole nudges the edge of her shirt up with a thumb, tapping on her badge until his eyes flick down. If possible, his expression sours even more, but he doesn’t say anything as they pass and that was the goal. This guy isn’t going to so much as look at Waverly, so help her God.

She tucks Waverly into the passenger seat of her car, leaning over to get the seat belt. A moment of chivalry that makes Waverly huff, but she doesn’t unclick the mechanism and snap it close herself like she’s done before. 

Nicole keeps a hand on her knee. Five miles down the road, her hand is inching up Nicole’s thigh, and the look is gone.

*  
Nicole thinks. She thinks, and she reviews, mulling over certain parts of human nature that being a sheriff’s deputy has revealed unto her. All the portents, and all the signs. 

She does all that for two weeks, then sets up a sweet little ambush. She rolls onto the homestead in a moment she knows Wynonna will be home, and Waverly will definitely be absent. 

“Yo ho ho, Hot Lips. And a bottle of rum. Whiskey. Whatever.” Wynonna has one heel up on the porch railing, canting her chair back. Nicole can see a hickey riding just outside her shirt collar. Left there by a dark head, though Nicole has long since given up trying to determine the specific owner of the dark head. “To what do I owe the honour?”

Nicole, as peace officer, has learned how to refine her interactions with those she protects and serves. She’s learned to negotiate, and to charm, and even to prevaricate. But she’s miserable at lying, and she has never, never forgotten how to shoot straight from the hip.

“Did Champ Hardy ever hit Waverly?”

Wynonna blinks. “Has anyone ever told you that you like to ride the edge of some very heavy confidences?” 

Nicole shrugs, and doesn’t answer. 

“Hey,” Wynonna says with a false and bright smile, “remember that time Waverly called you the smart one?”

“Sure,” Nicole allows. “Hazy recollections. That one day I got shot by Willa Earp.”

“Only somewhat shot, you baby,” Wynonna zings back, but then she’s cocking her head, like a quizzical dog. “Did the smart somehow run out of that fake bullet hole?”

“Wynonna,” Nicole warns. She’s standing on low ground. Head tipped back to look upwards, throat barred, seeking confidences that might not be hers to ask. Doesn’t matter. She has no intention of losing this encounter. 

Wynonna sighs, and points the bottle towards Nicole. “Look, Haught, let me ask you this: Is Champ Hardy still alive?" 

Nicole grunts. 

“And there it is.” Wynonna drops the bottle back to her knee. 

“How often?” Nicole demands. 

“Often enough,” Wynonna says, and Nicole snaps out her name again with a sharp invective.

“It’s not like I _counted_ , you know,” Wynonna says. “I was a kid, too. It wasn’t once a week, but it was definitely more than once a month. Mostly it was just a belt. But he split her lip twice. Once when she was four, and again when she was six.”

“Just,” Nicole says. “Just a belt.” 

She’s imagining Waverly’s hoisted wrist inside the hard grip of a man who was supposed to love her above all other things, jaw locked against the pain he rains down. She lopes onto the porch and drops herself into the chair next to Wynonna, who hands her the whiskey. Nicole takes a healthy pull. In full view of the world, wearing her uniform, in the middle of the day. 

She rolls the alcohol around her mouth, searching for fucks. She comes up pretty blank.

“Maybe Waverly’s actually right, and you aren’t as dumb as you look,” Wynonna says. Nicole snorts.

“I’m the best of the cop shop, sure. But that shop is located in East SheepFuck.”

“Hey,” Wynonna protests mildly. “Don’t sell yourself short. This is Central SheepFuck, at least.”

Nicole opens her mouth to agree. To act just like an Earp, and steamroll right over something that feels like a mortal blow. What she actually says is: “Did you shoot him on purpose?”

“Yeah, about that,” Wynonna says carefully. “Some accidents really are accidents. It’s just that you don’t one hundred percent feel bad about having caused them. Plus, shut up because I’m aware of the concept of statute of limitations.”

“Okay,” Nicole says. She takes another drink. Together, they watch the Rockies slowly change color as the sun slides westward. 

“Four years old,” she finally says. “She must have been so tiny.”

“Look, Nicole. Some shit is just…it’s shit. But Waverly is smart, and capable, and she’s all grown up. Don’t turn her into some sort of damaged waif. I’ll kick your ass if you do something like that.”

“I thought you were going to kick my ass if I ever made her cry,” Nicole points out.

“You regularly put your perverted cop hands all over my one and only baby sister. Why limit myself when discussing reasons to kick your ass?”

“Mmmm,” Nicole agrees, snatching the bottle back and taking a half swallow. “Fair point.”

“Damn skippy.” 

By the time Waverly arrives, Nicole can smile again. It looks real, because it is real. She learned something new today, but Wynonna is right. The things that happened in Waverly’s past have certainly shaped her, but she isn’t damaged goods. She pulls Waverly down into her perverted cop lap, kissing her soundly while Wynonna makes sounds like an angry teapot.

She can’t say that she feels any extra reverence that night when she covers Waverly’s body with her own, but she certainly doesn’t feel any less. She figures that will do, for now.

 

*****  
Nicole slides the little plush box across the table, and Waverly’s eyes shoot wide in panic.

“Wow,” Nicole says, and Waverly looks up with dismay writ large. “Just open it, okay?”

Waverly opens it, holding her breath in a way Nicole decides diplomacy should not notice. “Oh, hey,” she whispers at the little locket. Flicking it open and finding a picture of Nicole, and one of Wynonna.

“I had to threaten Wynonna in order to keep it a secret,” Nicole tells her, but Waverly has gone liquid. Nicole thumbs a tear away.

“So it’s okay?” she asks.

“It’s perfect,” Waverly says. Nicole nods, because Waverly is right. Sure, they’ll sometimes grind against each other’s tempers, and Waverly’s taste in music is kind of horrible. Plus there’s the odd demon possession or vampire glamor. Still, Waverly is completely and utterly perfect, and this hadn’t been bad, as practice rounds go. 

 

*****  
The day the first snow flies, her old Staff Sergeant shows up at the Purgatory Sheriff’s Department. Just standing there on the civilian side of the front counter, like this isn’t unusual at all. He knocks on the polished wood countertop, and she looks up.

“Hey, Haught. I was in town. I thought I’d stop in, and see how you’re doing.”

“Yeah, bullshit,” is out before she can censor it. He laughs.

“Well, that part hasn’t changed, has it?”

All she does is look back at him. A few weeks ago she killed a vampire, an actual and certain vampire. After that kind of moment, a staff sergeant doesn’t hold much terror.

“Come get coffee with me.”

Nicole takes him to Shorty’s, Doc himself delivering coffee mugs and poorly concealed curiosity. His old eyes are narrow and suspicious as a cat. Nicole glares at him, and flicks him away with the tips of her fingers. He leaves without any grace. 

It’s nice that everyone wants Waverly treated right, but Doc really needs to solidify a couple pertinent fact about things of a homosexual nature. 

“No one in Purgatory is just in town, especially in winter,” she tells her old supervisor, once they have their mugs doctored.

“Yeah, okay,” he admits. “I was in the city, and I saw the sign for Purgatory. I made a little spur of the moment detour.”

“Why?” She asks, because they hadn’t been friends. He hadn’t even been a mentor, really. He hadn’t yelled at her any more, or any less than the other rookies, and she hadn’t felt any need to please him.

He fiddles with the handle of his mug, and Nicole feels intuition crackling like ozone. “My wife died. It was unexpected. Sudden. We had traveling plans.”

“I’m sorry,” Nicole says automatically. He flicks it off the same way she’d shooed Doc away.

“So now I’m driving west, to see what I can see. You’re a spur of the moment decision, when I saw the sign for Purgatory. I wanted to see what a small town has done for you.”

“And?” She puts an ankle on the opposite knee and leans back, opening herself up to whatever assessment he might make. He looks at her like a challenge, but she doesn’t back down. It feels exactly like channeling Waverly, with her boldness and her verve.

“You used to be itchy. One of those kids just waiting to die saving some drugged up fuckwit and getting some stupid posthumous medal.”

Well, now. Apparently dead wives take the standard social moors and tosses them into the void. Even for someone who hangs around the Earps of Purgatory, this conversation is taking the cake on supressed emotional content.

“I saved a fuckwit cow,” she says. “Her name is Daisy.” She’ll have to apologize for the fuckwit comment tonight, but right now is right now.

“Looks like you’ve come into your own.” It could have been teasing, considering the cow content, but she can tell he’s being sincere.

“No more itch?” She demands, somewhere in the wasteland between bemused and righteously pissed off. 

“No, you’re still itchy. That kind of shit never goes away. I think you’ve just found something to live for, instead of something to die for.” 

She puffs out her cheeks, blowing _fuck you_ back out unsaid. If Staff wants to lay truths on her, he’s going to have to deal with getting truths in return. 

“I learned something.”

“What?”

“I learned that God, entropy, whatever, promises us a lifetime, but nobody says nothin’ about the timeline. I don’t know how long I’ll get to live, but I ain’t rushing towards any kind of ending.”

“What does that mean?” He seems genuinely curious, and she wonders how many internal frequencies have to change in order to endure saying _my wife died_ over and over again, because right now it sure seems like a lot. 

“It means fuck you, _buddy_. I’ve got a county to protect, and a family to love, and nothing on earth is going to keep me from doing those things.” 

She looks him in the eye, something high and hot inside, and he nods. “Look at you,” he says. “Didn’t you find your fire, Haught.”

For all he’s smart, he doesn’t get it quite right. Because they aren’t friends, and he’s never been her mentor. She has always had her fire. What she’s found is the right quench to temper her.

**Author's Note:**

> That’s it. Keep cool, internet friends. Don’t traffick drugs on the high seas, and we’ll never meet in person.
> 
> If you've read this far, consider clicking the Kudos button, even a few years down the line. It's not just ego. This story will live in the light, or die on obscurity according to its ability to be found using the sorting filters.
> 
> 40°18.9’N, 073°27.5’W


End file.
